Kendo UI Q1 2012 Release Available Now

The moment you longed-for, fellow JavaScript developers, has finally come! The next important milestone in Kendo UI's progress towards an all-in-one HTML5/JS framework for cross-platform and cross-device development has arrived! The fresh Q1'12 bits are now available for immediate download, marking the first official release of the Kendo UI Mobile and Kendo UI DataViz suites, and thus giving you all the tools essential for client-side desktop and mobile development.

In case you missed the betas, Kendo UI Mobile widgets automatically adapt to the look and feel of mobile platforms - iOS, Android or BlackBerry - where your apps run, guaranteeing a native experience for end users. You do not have to worry whether your mobile app will look iOS-ish on iOS device or Android-ish on Android, this will happen instantly when using Kendo UI Mobile without any extra code required! Nifty, ah? This is out-of-the-box gem that no other current mobile framework provides, so grab it and take advantage of it now!

In case I haven't managed to whet your appetite enough to download today's release, here is a quick recap of the new stuff across the entire Kendo UI spectrum you'll find in this release.

Kendo UI Mobile

With Q1 2012, our mobile package is ready for prime time! Following the first and second Beta releases in the previous months that helped us refine the functionality you need to build cross-platform mobile apps (thanks to your feedback!), we are proud to deliver the first official version of Kendo UI Mobile. There are two fundamental pillars that make our mobile suite stand out from the rest of the mobile solutions offered today:

Complete Framework: Kendo UI Mobile is more than just UI. As part of the complete Kendo UI framework, Kendo UI Mobile gives you everything you need to build powerful mobile apps with HTML and JavaScript.

Adaptive UI: Kendo UI Mobile widgets automatically adapt to the platform on which mobile apps are deployed. You write your code once and your mobile application is automatically imbued with native look-and-feel for iOS, Android and BlackBerry devices (if you are curious about WP7 support, read this blog).

All this fine-tuned with pixel-perfect rendering and high-optimized performance.

Furthermore, Kendo UI Mobile is compatible with PhoneGap, allowing you to compile applications built with Kendo UI Mobile and deploy them to device app stores! PhoneGap deployment gives you access to device APIs, like the camera, accelerometer, and more. Ultimately, it is up to you to choose whether you want your mobile apps to be accessible via a browser, through an app store, or both. No matter your choice, Kendo UI Mobile is ready to help.

How easy is it to create my first Kendo UI Mobile application, you may ask? Here is a very simplistic solution that outlines all you have to do to put together your Hello World application:

as well as a set of eight UI widgets, including buttons, listview, scrollers, navigation widgets, and more. This gives you the needed underpinning to build diverse mobile apps that "look right" on the three most popular mobile platforms. And as I know that no words can replace the actual thrill when exploring and playing with demos online, I give you the:

The charts/gauges take full advantage of the hardware acceleration (when available) and strive to deliver maximum performance, while ensuring the broadest reach possible by utilizing HTML5 and SVG/VML graphics. And the configuration once again can be done in a breeze, as my colleague Brandon described in his recent blog post.

Kendo UI Web

Let's not forget the "original" Kendo UI Web, as it also has a lot to offer with this new release! Two new major widgets join the suite (HTML Editor with iOS 5.0+ support, and ListView) which extend significantly your dev arsenal to create feature-rich and responsive web solutions. The Grid also receives more love in this release and gets a variety of edit modes (inline, popup, etc.), an enhanced editing experience via custom editors, as well as built-in footer and group aggregates.

Moreover, to make the touch-enabled apps built with Kendo UI Web even more "scroll-friendly" on mobile, we supercharged all widgets which support scrolling with out-of-the-box kinetic scrolling "borrowed" from the Kendo UI Mobile core.

Another important additional is the new MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) framework extension, which will certainly be greeted by the fans of the MVVM design pattern. It allows for easy differentiation between the conceptual app views (containing the Kendo UI widgets) and the data model, while at the same time keeping both in sync to reflect any changes in the UI or the underlying model. Performance and intuitiveness are the two major concepts that drove the development of the MVVM framework extension, and I believe you will be happy with the end results. I encourage you to review this article to get started and dig deeper into the Kendo UI MVVM.

Last but not least, we revamped the navigation for the Kendo UI online demos and improved the design, content and experience on kendoui.com with one single purpose - to make the flow as easy and transparent as possible for you, when transitioning between the site pages, demos, docs, etc. Let us know whether you find those improvements useful and intuitive.

These are the major things I selected to share with you in my Q1'12 Kendo UI release post, but I only scratched the surface! For anything else that I might have inadvertently skipped, refer to the full-blown release notes and the demos/docs. The rest I am leaving to your creativity and passion to create unmatched web experiences with Kendo UI!

And if you are reading this before 11.00AM EDT (US Eastern) today, there's still time to join us for the big release keynote. Register right nowand join us in a few hours for a fun overview of the latest release...as well as a few more special announcements!

About the authorStefan Rahnev is the Unit Manager of the Kendo UI Telerik Division. He has been working for the company since 2005, when he started out as a regular support officer. His next steps at Telerik took him through the positions of Technical Support Director, co-team leader in one of the ASP.NET AJAX teams and unit manager of the ASP.NET AJAX and MVC divisions. Stefan’s main interests are web development, agile processes planning and management, client services and psychology.

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